Letter: National labs' main focus should be civil technology

Editor,

In Thursday's Daily Lobo, student Estaban Sena wrote, "Without the continuing need for improved military technology, New Mexico would not have much else to offer the nation." The truth is that while the national laboratories support the economic welfare of some people, what they create is not beneficial to our nation in general.

The employees of the labs use their minds and our resources to create weapons that are, for the most part, never meant to be used at all, but to function as deterrents. So, we have a group of people being paid to produce things that are only meant to create fear while having no practical function. Furthermore, the production of these useless things creates massive amounts of waste that both contaminate our environment and require large amounts of space and energy to store.

Here's a simple solution that supports lab workers and our nation as a whole: the people working at the labs continue to get paid, while the laboratories shift their focus from weapons technology to civil technology. For a time, the workers may be paid to do very little as the labs alter their mission from producing weapons of mass destruction to the creation of livable communities. My guess is that they wouldn't be doing nothing for long. We need to create different forms of transit and energy; the basic infrastructure - such as energy, plumbing, roads and housing - is in disrepair for many communities; and thousands of people are suffering from diseases and disabilities and are in desperate need of new forms of treatment and health care. With this shift in focus, our national labs would truly be laboratories of and for our nation.

Currently, they primarily support large corporations while the majority of the people in this nation fend for themselves. For example, in 2005, Lockheed Martin took more than $34 billion from the nation, Boeing more than $30 billion, Raytheon more than $18 billion and Halliburton more than $8 billion. At the same time, workers' wages are at their lowest point in years, and a recent study of personal debt in the U.S. showed that 40 percent of all personal bankruptcies are caused by medical debt. While some of the money corporations take is invested back into U.S. communities, most of it is used in other countries directly for war or for the support of war through the building and maintenance of U.S. embassies and military facilities.

Imagine if the workers at the national laboratories devoted their intelligence and our resources to technologies of creation rather than destruction. And imagine if these creations were applied directly to communities within the U.S. That would be something great that New Mexico could offer the nation.

Sam Roth

UNM staff